Back then it was a Contractors Special. Now it’s a Diamond in the rough. And it’s taken a price cut. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised. I would’ve expected this to have been sold already given what an awesome deal it was before. Now its an even more awesome deal!

Just imagine the possibilities. How much lower can this go? What would you build on this lot to maximize its full potential?

16 Responses to “NSFB2 (Not Safe For Breakfast): A little deferred maintenance in San Francisco”

Whoever bought the house must have bought it a very long ass time ago as the owner only paid a measly $592 in property taxes in 2008. Maybe they are the original owners of the home and is/are centurions? My god if Walls Could Talk! I’m guessing the owners are looking to cash out their beautiful rustic cabin. With inflation taken into account, I’d say they would still come out behind if they sold for $1 mil, so the house is way undervalued. Perhaps it’s priced way bellow market value that people become suspicious of this wonderful beautiful antique cabin. Raise the asking price to $1 mil and I bet they will get many offers.

Since it’s a probate sale, the owner(s) must have already cashed out. But that gives me a thought. Perhaps the highest and best use is as a private mausoleum, a sort of mini-temple monument. Just a zoning change or two and the wealthiest SFers can view Noe Valley for eternity.

I lived in that neighborhood a little further east. It’s a very nice area of the city, but that house looks like Bob Toll spent a year eating nothing but spicy burritos and took every dump on the lot. Seriously.

However, sales are still 21% below the levels of a year ago, when new homes sold in June at an annualized rate of 488,000, according to the report released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Four years ago, during the height of the housing boom, the sales rate for June was 1,374,000, nearly three-and-a-half times higher than last month.

Many investors celebrated Monday after June’s “surge” in U.S. new-home sales. Alas, it was largely wishful thinking.

True, the Census Bureau reported sales up 11% from May. That’s a big number, at first glance justifying Monday’s 4.5% leap in the Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction Index. But it fails a close inspection.

First, home sales quite often jump in June, the height of the spring selling season. When trying to gauge the strength of home sales, then, it makes more sense to compare them to the same month a year ago. That comparison is less kind — sales were down 21.3% from June of 2008.

Seasonally unadjusted data show a total of 36,000 new homes were sold last month, the lowest June total since 1982, notes Richard Moody, chief economist at Forward Capital.

And the Census Bureau warns against assuming too much precision in these numbers, which are based on a sample survey. Accounting for a 13.2% margin of error — at a 90% confidence level, suggesting the actual error could be higher — new-home sales enjoyed somewhere between a 24.2% gain or a 2.2% decline from May.

New-home inventories are falling, an encouraging development. But inventories are still higher than their historical norm, and there remains an avalanche of distressed sales.

Little wonder, then, that June’s “surging” sales were driven by heavy discounting. The median new-home price — not seasonally adjusted — fell 12% in June from a year ago to $206,200, the lowest June sales price since 2003. And it was down 5.8% month on month.

To paraphrase Pyrrhus, if sales keep soaring like this, then homebuilders will be utterly undone.

This house is sitting for several reasons. First of all is that it’s a probate sale. No court confirmation (good) but you still have to give a 10% deposit with an offer and no financial contingency. If buyer can’t secure a loan that 10% is down the drain. And one is hard pressed to find a lender willing to give out a loan on a dump like this one in times like this.

Second is that the cost of repair could very well exceed the price of the home. I don’t know what’s wrong with the house but it sure looks like it’s in very poor shape. Forget about tearing it down, the SF dept will never allow that to a “historic” home. You will have to patch everything which can be more expensive than building a new house. This kind of projects has been known to bankrupt people.

So this property’s targeted demographic is a cash buyer who is not afraid of taking on the SF Planning Dept and can afford to wait 1-2 years for the whole project to complete.

Unlikely. The 1906 quake mostly burned down houses east of Van Ness. The fire was caused by ruptured gas lines so it mostly affected areas where people lived. Noe Valley in 1906 probably had more wild animals than people.

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